Screw it. I've had this one in my head for ages, and there's no chance it'll ever get made because I don't know the first thing about puzzle design. The idea is, you have a bunch of these little people with mind-control helmets on, and you're trying to get them somewhere. Trouble is, you only have one controller, and it makes them all move in unison. So if one has to jump over an obstacle, they all have to jump, etc. You can do things to mess with the pattern like have one of them continually walk into a wall while the others keep moving, but it's very limited. So the game is like a cross between a platformer and a block-pushing puzzle.

It would have been called Hivemind, and the little helmets looked like bees' butts:

And originally the premise was that you were an alien abducting people, but then I decided to go for a more generic eastern-European dystopian theme because then I could call the mind-control device a Brain Kontrol Electronic Pulse Relay, or B-KEPR for short.

- Game is a 3rd-person open-world action-adventure game
- Setting is a Galactic Federation colony on the fringes of their territory that's been taken over by Space Pirates for the last 10 years (they came because the planet is actually a Chozo Science World and has a bunch of advanced technology to plunder); colonists live in a totalitarian police state performing forced labour for the Pirates; Samus arrives after getting a distress signal from the planet and is subsequently shot down
- Game would be post-Fusion for story reasons
- Gameplay involves a generous mix of exploration, fast-paced third-person combat that involves swiftly dealing with enemies w/ little/no cover shooting), and stealth to navigate the main cities and worksites that she'll have to infiltrate
- Powerups would include Grapple, Speed Booster, and a powerup that increases her reaction speed (bullet-time effect). High-Jump Boots would also be included, but would have a charging ability that would act as sort of a mini-Shinespark, and can synergize with the Grapple Beam to allow her to vault off of walls and into enemies
- Samus is locked out of Fusion Suit at the start of the game by a Chozo AI; the same AI sent the distress signal that brought her there. It doesn't trust her despite her possessing Chozo blood due to the presence of Metroid DNA and her "knock-off" Power Suit
- Tutorial involves building a minimum level of trust with the AI, and eventually unlocks Morph Ball, Bombs, Missiles, and eventually, control over the Suit itself
- Once suit control is acquired, Samus can freely change between her Power Suit and civilian attire. She can also go instant Morph Ball from her unarmored state.
- Civilian attire is needed to be able to access settlements, especially the main city where security is through the roof. It's also needed for infiltration into many areas.
- Settlements will have energy modules (to restore health) and fabricator modules (to restore missiles) for purchase, as well as different clothes and uniforms to help her move around inconspicuously in various locations
- A rebel faction also exists in the colony proper, working to overthrow the Space Pirates
- End goal is to acquire all needed powerups and rally the colonists to trigger an insurrection to assault the final area at the center of the main city
- There's probably Metroids involved somewhere. Probably.

imagining 3D Dot Game Heroes-esque adventure game centered around a mechanic of developing your character visually in tandem with statistically

you start off as an "unidentified spirit", which is a single pixel bloated to the size of a game tile. in the game's intro, you're just square-ing around looking for a purpose until you meet a bunny who says they "used to be like you" and guides you to your first Shrine of Identification. for each unique shrine you visit, you can double your character's sprite resolution if you have enough pixels (a form of currency and a literal resource) to fill a quadrant of your upgraded resolution (for instance, to upgrade from 8x8 to 16x16 you would need 64)

when your sprite has a complexity of 2x2 or greater, you can visit any shrine to edit it. your character's color palette is associated with each stat they have, and you can choose any color to represent each stat. for instance, if STR is represented by red pixels, your character has 1 STR for each red pixel their sprite uses. there would probably be some limitation to this which prevents total pixel barf from becoming optimal, such as: you can only save a sprite that uses between 25% and 75% of its total area, and there may be some effective cap where enough pixels of the same color will stop counting toward a stat

otherwise, there would probably be a few aesthetic tickbox options like:

mirrorflip - assumes the above two options with a slight distinction: your sprite can be flipped and mirrored at the same time if you last moved in any combination of up/right

complex - overrides all of the above except floaty and mirror. gives your sprite 8 zelda 1-style walking animation frames to work with: two frames for each direction

supercomplex - overrides all of the above except floaty and mirror. gives your sprite 12 LttP-style walking animation frames to work with: each direction has an "idle" frame it will default to when you're not moving, as well as two frames for stepping forward on either foot

animation frames would of course not influence the character's stats, but your character's base sprite will always be used as one of the down-facing frames. if mirror is checked, your character's right-facing animation will be made from mirroring the left-facing one, leaving you with only 6 or 9 frames to create in total

Last night I had a dream about some kind of shadow monster that could be defeated by ducking into a dark place because it basically dissolves into the surrounding darkness. So now I want that to be a thing in a video game.

i just had a dream about some mythical stage-based top-down action-RPG for the Game Boy Color which had this odd joint compatibility with the SNES that let you play co-op between multiple cartridges

essentially the GBC version followed a more comprehensive single-player RPG format, where you'd get a big ol' menu between each stage that lets you do stuff like take on sidequests, craft items, recruit playable characters and so on

playing the game on a SNES made it more like a beat-em-up where each of the main stages just leads straight into the next one, and you have to manage your chosen character's selected weapon and spell and stuff on the fly. anything you did in a SNES play session was reflected on your GBC save file, but EXP/loot were not universally shared, so each enemy defeated only gave back to each player based on what that player put toward defeating it

anyway, believe it or not the cross-cartridge/system functionality isn't what interests me about this game, but how it seemed to have an almost roguelike variation per-playthrough. you didn't really have an opportunity to grind or farm because whatever progress you made mid-stage was undone if you wiped, and you also couldn't just replay a cleared stage. yet there also wasn't any sort of permadeath mechanic, despite there being a huge amount of variance in what cards the game might deal to you on each save file. i mean that literally; there was a system where you collected cards by achieving certain feats throughout a stage, and at the end of that stage you'd draw the number of cards you collected from a "deck" which represents the game's pool of item shops, sidequests and the like. whatever became available to you between each stage was based on the cards you drew

it was ultimately a game that pushed you to be resourceful by the playthrough, but still introduced a dose of chaos to prevent things from becoming solved and stale. sounds a lot like a game i'd want to make someday

So there's checkpoints between levels and it rerolls the current level when you die? I like it. Takes the term "roguelite" to its logical conclusion.

I've been thinking about turn-based RPGs lately, and how no matter how "fast" some characters are supposed to be compared to others, they all still get exactly one turn each per go-around. Some games try to deal with this by putting everyone on visible cooldown timers, but this introduces a real-time element where enemies' timers are still ticking down while you poke through the menu deciding what to do. And if the game just pauses whenever it's one of your party members' turns, you lose the ability to tell whose turn is next. So here's my solution: Running across the screen just above the menu is a timeline. Each move takes a certain number of "ticks" to execute, which can sometimes include discrete windup, followthrough, and cooldown subtimers. This is key, because if your next turn happens to come during an enemy's followthrough, that's how you can do counters. Anyway, spread across the timeline are pips representing when each character will be able to make their next move. When you choose your move, it will show a preview of how long each possible move will take, as a bar. You can also cue up multiple moves all the way up to where the timeline ends at the right edge of the screen, and you can only get combo/juggling bonuses if you chain moves ahead of time rather than wait until your next turn, but some enemies may be able to counter you during this and it adds considerably to your cooldown time. (And yes, this means you can cue up combos that will continue on after your teammates start their turns. Presumably the first character's attack animation will be frozen in place as you choose the second character's move.) Adding to the fun is that you eventually end up with a party member who can foresee when enemies' next turns will come up, but either this will only be visible when it's their turn or they'll have to waste a turn of their own to do it. That'll have to be ironed out in testing.